I read from a book that there was a battlecruiser called Alaska, armed with 12-inch main guns, but I don't know if that's accurate.
Alaska and Guam were two ships completed from a class intended to include six ships. The official classification of the ships was "large cruisers," which may remind you of the classification of Imperial Germany's armored cruisers and battlecruisers. It is generally futile to worry overly much about the exact label that ought to be used here. Alaska does look rather like a second-class battleship, and there's certainly no shortage of people who call her a battlecruiser. The ambiguous status is reflected in the names; American convention at the time gave state names to battleships and city names to cruisers, while the Alaskas had the names of US territories. The design had its start in concerns over German and Japanese pocket battleships. (Japanese pocket batleships? Yep. The US had heard a rumor of such things, but we now know it was just a rumor.) There was also a concern about Japan's big heavy cruisers and the threat they might pose to American aircraft carriers. The design process was fairly tortuous, and it may be that the USN would have dropped the project entirely if not for the personal interest of FDR. The Alaskas are usually seen as giant wastes of effort and materiel. In their limited run, the large cruisers were disproportionately expensive, and they offered little that couldn't be gotten from more established designs. I have a distinct dislike for them, mostly because of their remarkable vulnerability to torpedoes. As surface combatants, they had reasonable armor for their intended role, and the 12in gun was quite good (though the mounts apparently had some bugs). Despite their problems, the Alaskas have many fans on aesthetics grounds. Me, I never found them particularly attractive.
One does wonder why FDR took so deep a personal interest in these ships, since there doesn't seem to have been any pressing need for them, unlike, say, the escort carriers. :roll:
